Founded on a dishonesty

THREE years ago, the BBC presenter Chris Packham appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today to announce the creation of a new organisation, Wild Justice, set up to ‘fight for wildlife’ through the legal system and to change the law.

The BBC giving its presenter a platform to launch a political campaign was, at the very least, a questionable act for a licence fee-funded national broadcaster, but the BBC seems to have decided some time ago that the usual rules do not apply in such cases., the BBC Trust concluded in 2016 that Packham was a ‘recurrent’ presenter, not a regular one, and that the BBC’s editorial guidance did not therefore apply to him despite the fact that he had regularly presented programmes for the BBC for more than a decade.